Career so far

25 years making fast, stable & delightful software. Mostly tools that give smart, motivated people leverage (even tools for making other tools).

Design is my well-worn hat, but I have technical and product ones, too. Player-coach. Stem cell. Web-spinner, since good tools take a lot of people pulling the same way.

8⅙ yearsWas partner at ZURB (8⅙ years). Designed new product for Palantir, Facebook, Photobucket, and 200 other companies. Incubated our own startup. Rippled the pond with Foundation, our open-source front‑end framework.

Worked briefly at a startup partnering with Apple on early TV apps.

2⅓ yearsLed design and then product at Zazzle (2⅓ years), another Z-named company with awesome on-demand manufacturing tech and creative tools under the hood. Invented, rebranded, saved Christmas once.

Power user of a tool called Grammarly. Swapped notes with Alex, a cofounder, now and then.

1⅝ yearsFounding product designer at Coda (1⅝ years) where we gave everyone a familiar docs-and-spreadsheets interface for building their own tools. Earned a patent. Made lifelong friends.

The very first user of a tool called Figma. (37:40)

3⅝ yearsHead of design & research at Looker (3⅝ years), chasing the same vision as Coda from the data side. Led a 15-person design and research team, raising the bar bit by bit in an org new to design. Small wins, big wins. Drove Looker 2.0: natural-language LookML with a live, reactive modeler, years before LLMs made it look obvious. Bittersweet $2.6B acquisition by Google.

the pandemicCo-founded and bootstrapped Jump (pandemic years), to let anyone write software in plain English and point-and-click. Pre-LLM. The tech worked; the timing didn’t.

Learned a bunch from Ryan Singer (shaping) and Bob Moesta (jobs to be done) about matching supply to true demand.

2½ yearsHead of design at Turnstile (2½ years), an end-to-end revenue platform. Designed v1 (many times over), then its design system, then the platform it grew into. Price any way you want; tame the chaos.

nowBuilding Rel at RelationalAI as product lead, with a small, high-trust team. The old dream in a new form: an interface where people and agents share context for how a business actually works.

I haven’t had this much fun building since the late ’90s.